Category Archives: News commentary

David Brooks writes that suburban growth in the 1980s and 1990s “overshot the mark.” People moved further out from urban centers than they really wanted to, and as a result ended up “missing community and social bonds.” “If you ask people today what they want,” he says, “they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers” than suburban golf courses.

How does he know? How many people has he talked to? What data does he have to support this? If it is true, I don’t have any problem with it, but I don’t want to see people make policy based on New Urbanist fantasies and speculations.

The actual numbers show that some people are moving downtown (often supported by local subsidies), but the suburbs are still growing far faster. Sociological analyses find that people in the suburbs have more social ties, not less, than people in central cities, so the whole “sense of community” argument stinks.

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In keeping with its tradition of judging programs based on their intentions rather than results, the American Planning Association has given its 2008 Award for Public Outreach to Portland’s Mayor, Tom Potter, for his VisionPDX program. This was a strange program to begin with, as Portland planners had already endlessly solicited residents for their opinions through hearings, open houses, and charrettes (not that any of the surveys were scientific).

Stranger still, since Potter was elected to a four-year term, was the timetable. It took more than two years just to collect and collate public opinions, and more time yet to make sense of it all (not that much of it made sense). This left Potter, who leaves office in January, little time to do anything about it.

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Obama’s pick for transportation secretary, outgoing Illinois Represenative Ray LaHood, was a surprise, since the early rumors focused on liberals from large urban areas such as San Francisco or Portland. Instead, LaHood is a Republican representing Peoria, whose urbanized area population is only about a quarter million people.

Not counting Defense Secretary Gates (who considers himself Republican but is not registered in any political party), LaHood will be the token Republican in Obama’s cabinet, just as Norman Mineta was the token Democrat in Bush’s first cabinet. Though LaHood has called himself a “true conservative” — which could mean just about anything — he is highly praised by liberals such as Mark Shields.

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A report from the Swedish Institute for Transport and Communications Analysis (SIKA) finds that rail transportation may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but at an extremely high cost. The report, which was prepared at the request of the Swedish government, is available only in Swedish, but an English summary is in this news report.

The report found that rail transportation emits about 20 percent less greenhouse gases than autos, but rail service is so expensive that it would be more effective to simply improve auto technologies. Reducing one ton of greenhouse gases with rail costs $6,500, said the report, while reducing it with auto improvements can cost less than $40 per ton. Nonetheless people should also know that this will provide you with the joy of sexual pleasure as an important part of a person’s healthy life. tadalafil online in uk see for more info Ejaculation time more than 4 minutes is normal and for the most part related to men levitra generic cheap who are sixty years and above. If taken 30 minutes to 1 hour before the sexual intercourse and works better if the stomach is empty. sildenafil pfizer is widely used by millions of men throughout the world suffer from erectile dysfunction. Your physician will probably see this link low priced viagra be the one particular to determine whether you should continue making use of the drug can be harmful and it can leave bad impacts to user. The news report does not make clear whether the SIKA report accounted for greenhouse gas emissions during rail construction, but if it did not, then rail’s cost per ton would be even greater.

With great fanfare appropriate to its great cost overruns, members of Congress opened a new visitor center at the foot of the nation’s capitol building. “What was conceived in the 1990s as a sensible $71 million celebration of democracy,” opined Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, “turned into a half-billion-dollar [actually, $621 million, more than $1,000 per square foot] shrine to legislative excess,” including an $85 million TV studio for senators.

Artist’s rendering of the Capitol Visitor Center.

Which, of course, makes it a great example of how representative democracy actually works.

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Last week, the Antiplanner reported that it appeared that the BART-to-San-Jose proposal had lost the necessary two-thirds of the votes needed for funding. Now it appears that absentee ballots made up the difference.

According to the latest results, measure B won 66.74 percent of the votes. A few thousand remained to be counted, but with the measure ahead of the required two-thirds by 481 votes, it seems unlikely to lose.

That’s good news for those who believe that every nutty rail proposal, no matter how expensive, should be funded. Yet this proposal was so bad that even, the real rail advocates in California, including the Sierra Club, opposed it.

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The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama will be our first president whose heritage is from the central cities since Grover Cleveland, who left the office in 1897. Prior to becoming president, Cleveland had been a reform mayor of Buffalo, and then governor of New York. I think they missed one: Theodore Roosevelt grew up in New York City and represented part of the city in the legislature. But presidents since then have been from suburbs or small towns.

Obama, however, was born in Honolulu, went to school in Jakarta, Los Angeles, and New York, and got his famous job as a community organizer in Chicago. His only “suburban” time was getting his law degree in Cambridge, MA.

From one perspective, the war on sprawl is really a war between central cities and suburbs. The central cities see the suburbs growing and want some of that growth (and the tax revenues that come with it) for themselves. By demonizing the suburbs, at the very least they have a chance to grab more than their share of federal and state funds for housing and transportation.

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Remember when TreasSec Henry Paulson got down on his knee to beg Nancy Pelosi to support his $700 billion recovery plan? He said he would use the money to buy mortgage securities in order to set a floor on their value and restore faith to the credit markets. Treasury Department wonks talked about reverse Dutch auctions and other fancy ways of making sure that the bailout would succeed and maybe even earn a profit for taxpayers.

Immense pressure was put on Congress to pass the bill authorizing Paulson’s plan. “If there is even the slightest chance it will work,” one congressman said, “we should do it.”

Now, a mere seven weeks after Paulson bent his knee, not only is there not the slightest chance it will work, there is not even the slightest chance that Paulson is going to do it. Paulson now admits that “it was clear to me” as early as October 3, the date the President signed the bailout bill, “that purchasing troubled assets” would not work. But he waits almost six weeks to tell us?

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